Monday, April 25, 2016

Painting as Conversation

“Color is more
important to me than anything else.”
David Reed

For the American abstract painter David Reed painting is a two-way
conversation that both links the past and the present and the artist with their
audience and for the latter color is an integral introduction.

As he explained to The
Oregonian’s DK Row “In the world today, we see a lot of wild and strange
color -- commercially made color, the color of cars, plastics, combined with
the natural colors of the world, combined with the media colors on television
and movies and computer screens and strange lights from all of those sources.
All of this is affecting us all of the time. But we don't have emotional
connotations for those colors. Painting is a way to deal with those emotional
connections and integrate them into this wonderful history that painting is.”

But the history that Reed is interested in is not the history
found in academic tombs but that which can be found on the street between like-minded
people.

As he told the Brooklyn
Rail’s John Yau “I love that about painting. I can find my own way. The street
history is a conversation, a long conversation. Dave Hickey says it started
when two guys sat down over cappuccinos at an outdoor café in Rome about 1620.
One said he liked the Farnese ceiling by the Carracci and the other said he
liked Michelangelo’s Sistine better. They argued. Dave says that conversation
is still going on and if you want to join in, you can.”

It
is the rational that in part drives Reed’s work. “One
of the reasons I love Baroque paintings so much is that they have all those
religious themes, but the paintings are not about that religious subject
matter. There’s a second meaning underneath. The painters used the religious
themes as metaphors to get at other subjects…What interests me about paintings are the connections to life. Paintings
are very subtle, true to emotions and feelings, which are very hard to
describe. These emotions and feelings are especially hard for me to understand
and describe verbally. Somehow through painting I can get to them,” he says.

And it is through abstraction that Reed endeavors to entice
his audience to join this conversation.

As he says “I want viewers to choose to participate and have
their own thoughts. I don’t want to control their thoughts at all. What’s
important is the connection and collaboration with the viewer, rather than
control. It’s easier to do this with abstraction, rather than figuration.’

Reed’s current exhibition of New Paintings is on show at New
York’s Peter
Blum Gallery until the 25th of June.

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The expat

Henry Bateman is an artist and writer currently living in Australia, a return home after living in the Philippines for 10 years. The Ex Expat, is his blog about the arts (often) and politics (sometimes).
His writing has been published by Crikey.com (Australia), Artslant (US), The Expat Travel & Lifestyle Magazine & The Expat Newspaper (both in the Philippines) and The Western Review (Australia).
He has also had seven solo exhibitions and has had his work shown in 15 group exhibitions as well as 35 theater commissions as a set designer and/or lighting designer.